Critical Essay by John M. Wallace

In the following essay, Wallace analyzes Timon of Athens from a Senecan perspective, suggesting that Shakespeare was influenced by the philosopher's De beneficiis and his ideas on gift-giving.

For reasons which are understandable enough, Shakespeare's modern editors have decided that Timon of Athens

Richard Pasco as Timon in Ron Daniels's 1980 Royal Shakespeare Company rendering of Timon of Athens.

is a "schematic" play in which, as David Bevington puts it [in Complete Works (1973)], "the dramatic situation is also unusually static for Shakespeare." Frank Kermode, in the most widely used college text [The Riverside Shakespeare (1974)], comments that Timon is "a tragedy of ideas, much more schematic than Hamlet" and adds that "the play was evidently designed to consist of two halves...